The solution:
In the months leading up to the initial lockdown, the IT and BlueFort teams had been assessing a range of potential alternative connectivity options, but all that fell by the wayside on March 23rd.
Jon Thomson said, “When in a code-red situation, you need a proven piece of technology, that’s scalable and resilient. We had confidence and faith in the BlueFort team and the Pulse Secure platform. Neither had let us down thus far, so we decided to stick with what we knew - a technology that is robust, scalable, and simply did its job.”
The first thing the BlueFort team did was to establish a Pulse Secure ICE (In Case of Emergency) licence for Trafford Council whilst they set up more permanent licences for the team to use. This emergency licence enabled Trafford to instantly address the dramatic peak in demand for remote access by supporting additional users on physical and virtual Pulse Secure PSA Series appliances.
With the lion’s share of the work taking place over what the team described as ‘a very long weekend’ within 10 days Trafford Council was able to scale up to provide reliable resilient access for 2100 employees with an average daily usage of 1500 users.